Sansa Did Not
by geekprincess26
Summary: Sansa could have kissed Jon any number of times, but she did not. She never stopped to wonder whether she might actually want to.


Sansa did not kiss Jon when they were in elementary school.

She was eight years old and still believed boys had cooties in their mouths when Robb brought his new friend home for dinner one autumn night. He and Jon had been assigned desks next to each other in Mr. Cassel's fourth-grade class at Northern Wintertown Elementary School and had become fast friends. Jon was very shy and barely said a word to anybody other than Robb, except for when he thanked Sansa's parents for having him. When he came around for dinner again the next week, Arya somehow got him to laugh, and the week after that, he showed Bran how to shoot a squirt gun. He didn't say anything to Sansa, though, for over a month, until the day when Mrs. Cerwyn sent her to the principal's office for arguing with Elia Sand during art class. Sansa had tried to tell Mrs. Cerwyn that Elia had snapped at her for trying to explain the rules of their painting project, but Mrs. Cerwyn would hear none of it. Sansa cried all the way to the office and back and held the pink slip she received as though it was burning a hole through her hand. Mother reprimanded Sansa very sharply when saw the slip, and when Father got home from work he told Sansa how disappointed he was, and then Robb looked at the painting on which she had spent hours and said it had too much pink in it. Sansa was about to start crying all over again when Jon told her the painting was pretty. His face turned as pink as the roses in it when he said so, but he smiled a little bit when Sansa thanked him.

Sansa did not kiss Jon when they were in middle school.

She was thirteen years old, and it was a cold Friday evening, and she and Jeyne Poole were spending the night at Wynafryd and Wylla Manderly's house. Wynafred and Wylla's parents went out to have a few hours to themselves and left the girls to enjoy pizza and movies in the basement. Wallace, the Manderly girls' older brother, was seventeen and technically in charge. Sansa thought he would stay in his room upstairs, but instead he got some of his friends to come over, and at some point somebody a number of them started a game of spin-the-bottle. Sansa did not want to play, but Jeyne pressured her, and, not wanting to be rude, Sansa gave in. She was both surprised and relieved to see Robb among the players, although both he and Jon, who sat silently next to him as usual, looked like they would rather be anywhere else. Sansa had a suspicion that Robb was only playing to impress Jeyne Westerling, and she supposed Jon must be there for moral support. After all, Jon barely looked at, let alone talked to, any girls that Sansa knew of except for Arya, who barely counted as a girl at all. Jon still hardly ever talked to Sansa, which made her all the more mortified when he spun the bottle and it pointed squarely at her. For a few moments she could only gape in horror. Then Theon nudged a furiously blushing Jon toward Sansa and wished him good luck on not getting his lip caught in Sansa's braces while kissing her. A tear ran down one of Sansa's cheeks as Jon shuffled forward awkwardly, and she squeezed her eyes shut partly to stop herself from crying and partly to avoid facing the mortification of what would surely happen next. Instead of feeling his lips smeared against her own, though, she felt Jon's arms encircling her body. She buried her face in his shoulder for a several moments, unable to face the others, and inhaled the smell of sweat and laundry detergent and something soft and piney. The other players were jeering and laughing at them, but Robb told them to shut up, and eventually, after Jon's lips brushed so lightly against the top of Sansa's head that they barely touched her at all, he patted her back and shuffled away, and the jeers subsided and the whoops began. Sansa shoved the bottle at Jeyne Poole, turned around, and fled straight past Jon down to the basement.

Sansa did not kiss Jon when they were in high school.

She was sixteen years old and had earned terrible grades on her first two geometry exams for the term. If she got one more bad exam grade, she would miss the honor roll for the first time since she had first been old enough to qualify for it. Her parents and teacher all suggested she see one of the senior students for tutoring, and although Sansa had never needed tutoring before, she skipped out on a Starbucks session with Jeyne Poole and her other friends one day to meet with Lancel Lannister. After an hour, Sansa was as confused as ever, but she met with him several more times until he declared she could learn nothing from him. Mortified, Sansa gathered her courage and texted Wynafryd Manderly, who put Sansa in touch with her friend Alys Karstark. Alys came to Sansa's house the next day, but Sansa quickly realized Alys only wanted an excuse to flirt with Robb, not a tutoring session with his little sister. Robb, instead of being a loyal big brother, flirted right back, and he only ended it when Jon stopped by. Sansa, who had barely spoken to Jon in the three years since the spin-the-bottle incident, felt her last nerve snap and began screaming in frustration at Robb. He rolled his eyes and told her to calm down, which of course only made her angrier. At last Mother intervened, but not without berating Sansa and asking what had gotten into her. When Sansa explained, she became more sympathetic, and for a moment Sansa thought they would have one of the deep, wonderful talks they had not had in far too long. But then Rickon and Bran began fighting, and Mother had to pull them apart. Sansa did not see her again until dinner, when she only forced herself to eat because of the concerned looks Father kept giving her. She even excused herself before Mother brought out the lemon cake. When she heard a soft knock at her door, she was not entirely surprised and expected that Mother, Father, or maybe even Robb had come to see why she had not eaten any of her favorite dessert. To her shock she found Jon there. He rubbed the stubble on his face for a few awkward seconds before asking her if she wanted him to review her geometry textbook with her when he came over the next day after school – but only if she wanted him to, of course. Sansa was so surprised she did not know what to say, and Jon had turned and begun to walk away before she finally found her voice and admitted that she would be glad to have him look at the book with her. It only occurred to her just before she dropped off to sleep that night that Jon had not once said she needed help. It was nice of him, she thought, to at least act like he did not think she was stupid at math.

Sansa did not kiss Jon when they were in college.

She was twenty years old, and Joffrey Baratheon had just broken her heart. "Books over boys" had been her motto until she had met him in Psychology 101 during their sophomore year. He had been tall, handsome, charming, clever, witty, and a gentleman – in short, irresistible. He had asked her out a month after they had met, and Sansa had fallen hard and fast for him. Over the next several months, though, his shining armor had shattered. His wittiness had turned into bitter sarcasm, his cleverness into manipulation, and his gentlemanliness into cutting remarks about how she really should know how to put out better by now. She had almost dumped him after that remark. He had dumped her instead the next week by informing her he had found a more adventurous woman in her roommate, Myranda Royce when she had caught them together in Myranda's bed. Sansa kept her head down as much as possible while trudging around campus for weeks afterward so that she could avoid the whispers and the giggles and even the sympathetic looks. Especially the sympathetic looks. So when she opened her door to a soft knock one evening and found Jon on the other side, she snapped at him and told him that he didn't need to bother looking after her or feeling bad for her, seeing as the whole university had that covered, and he needn't tell her he'd told her so, since she knew he'd never liked Joffrey. Jon only raised his eyebrows and said he'd been a bit worried when she hadn't shown up that day for one of the lunches they occasionally shared at the Panera Bread just across the street from the fine arts building. Then his face reddened right along with Sansa's and he scratched the back of his head and confessed that he had an ulterior motive for checking up on her, anyway. He was struggling in the English Literature 101 class he'd put off until his senior year, and he needed a better tutor than the ones he'd encountered in the school's writing and learning center. And everybody on campus knew Sansa Stark never got a grade lower than an A minus on a paper, not even from Professor Qyburn. Sansa regarded him with suspicion for a moment, but she reminded herself that Jon, unlike Joffrey, had never lied to her. And if everybody on campus knew that Sansa Stark could write a terrific paper, they also knew that Jon Snow knew absolutely nothing about any kind of literature, English or otherwise.

Sansa did not kiss Jon even once when they lived in the same New York apartment complex for a year.

She was twenty-five years old and had landed a job as an English teacher in a Manhattan charter school. He was working his way up the ranks at a prestigious engineering firm. He spent most of that year dating Ygritte, a feisty young police officer. Sansa spent most of it either buried in lesson plans or going on dead-end first dates. On occasion, she accompanied Jon to a museum or a Broadway show when Ygritte, who did not care for that sort of thing and even thanked Sansa for taking her place a couple of times, had to work a double shift. Jon and Ygritte even went on a few couples' dates with Sansa and some of her duds, and Ygritte never failed to come up with hilarious insults about them afterwards. Near the end of the year, though, she broke up with Jon. Sansa had never seen him quite so distressed or disheveled. She took to bringing him half of the cookies she always baked on Saturday afternoons, and more often than not they were oatmeal cookies, his favorite kind. After a few weeks, she noticed that the corners of his mouth would turn up when she did. One weekend, she talked him into attending the local Cinema 15 for a performance by Rifftrax, a comedy trio who produced very rude and very funny running commentaries on the worst sci-fi films known to mankind. Half an hour into the show, Jon was laughing so hard Sansa could feel him shaking in the red plush seat next to hers. The next month, they went to a speed dating event together purely in order to laugh like that again afterwards. But they did not laugh, because Sansa met a gorgeous young lawyer named Harry Hardyng there.

Sansa did not kiss Jon when they went to Arya and Gendry's wedding together.

She was twenty-nine years old, and every five minutes between the end of the ceremony and the commencement of the chicken dance, somebody was asking why that gorgeous, intelligent maid of honor hadn't found a Prince Charming of her own yet, since even her tomboyish, man-hating younger sister had managed to settle down. Furthermore, a disproportionate number of the askers were older wedding guests who raised their voices loudly enough for half the reception hall to hear. Sansa wanted to shout at them that it was because she wasn't gorgeous enough, or intelligent enough, or anything enough to keep even a piece of work like Joffrey Baratheon around, let alone a decent guy like Harry. After all, it hadn't been Harry's fault that his dream job had popped up on the West Coast just a week before the vehicle carrying Robb, Bran, and Sansa's mother had been hit by a drunk driver. Harry had been no more willing to pass up on the best opportunity of his life than Sansa had been to let her father and Arya take care of the others on their own, and so they had parted ways. Thinking about it made Sansa gag on her chicken cordon bleu, and she barely made it through her father's dance with Arya before she headed to the restrooms to cry. When she emerged, though, Jon was there with her favorite drink and an offer to dance. They spent much of the night arguing about which sci-fi movies were the most depressing and doing shots whenever somebody tried to make the deejay play "YMCA." Sansa was well on her way to the other side of tipsy when Jon escorted her to her hotel room, and later she decided that she would have kissed Jon if he had given her any encouragement, but he only stayed long enough to ensure that she was safely deposited onto her bed before he left.

Sansa decided to kiss Jon when he and the entire Stark family spent a week in the Poconos the summer after Arya's wedding.

She was thirty years old and using the summer to apply for a new teaching position. The principal at her former job had not taken her very seriously when she had filed a sexual harassment claim during the autumn term against a creepy fellow teacher named Ramsay Bolton. She had endured the odd stares and the even odder coincidental meetings outside of work – everywhere from the gym to the grocery store – for longer than she should have. Eventually, Jon and Margaery Tyrell, her best friend, had worn her down – she never had quite found the nerve to confess the extent of it to her family – and she had initiated a long, tedious process that resulted in a slap on the wrist for him and a lot of whispered rumors for her. Leaving her job was easy, but polishing her resume and applying for another position was more difficult, and Sansa had never been more in need of a week away from life than she was when she pulled her blue Toyota Corolla into the driveway of the sprawling vacation home the Starks rented every summer. And never had a vacation delivered more when she had needed it. She spent her mornings reading and drinking coffee and talking with Jon on the porch, her days cannonballing off the dock into Lake Pinecrest with far more enthusiasm than she had as a child, and the evenings out with her family at one local restaurant after another. Sansa always found herself seated next to or across from Jon at those restaurants, and she always enjoyed his company. It was not until the day before she left for New York that she realized not a night had gone by without somebody, whether a waitress or another patron whom Robb and Talisa had roped into taking a family photo of the Starks, had mistaken Jon for her husband or boyfriend. And not a morning had gone by, she realized as Jon approached her with two steaming mugs of coffee, when he had not taken it upon himself to deliver her coffee on the porch every morning, with just the right amount of cream and sugar stirred into it. She was unusually quiet that day, and when Jon approached her and asked if she was all right and whether she'd had any further trouble from Ramsay Bolton, she had answered with little more than quiet yeses and nos. When he rose from his chair on the porch, where they'd been watching the sunset, and rested his hand on her shoulder before wishing her good night, she could feel herself blushing furiously and thanked the gods that it was dark. Sansa used the entire drive home berating herself for trying to please Joffrey and Harry and so many other men when Jon had been hiding in plain view of her idiotic eyes for practically her whole life. When she got home, she decided that she would kiss Jon the following month, when she was due to visit his home city of Raleigh for a conference. They had already planned to have dinner with some friends the night before the conference started, but Jon had offered to pick her up at the airport before that. She tapped her foot against the floor of the coach-class cabin for nearly the entire flight in her eagerness to jump out of the plane and into Jon's arms. Only when she gotten to the curb, where his car was waiting, did she see the blonde woman in the passenger seat. Jon introduced her as his new girlfriend, Val, whom he had picked up at work after she'd had car trouble that afternoon. Sansa stared at him for a good ten seconds before pasting a smile onto her face and putting out her hand to shake Val's.

Jon kissed Sansa when he came home after spending three months in Africa with Engineers Without Borders.

She was thirty-two years old and already becoming forgetful, apparently; she hadn't put two and two together long enough to realize his arrival in Wintertown would coincide with her week's vacation there until her mother had mentioned it. He'd broken up with Val several months before he'd left for his trip, or so Robb had told her over FaceTime. She'd barely acknowledged him before ending the call and returning to Amazon, where she'd been aimlessly shopping for throw pillows for her new couch before he'd called. After hanging up with Robb, she'd found herself thinking that perhaps she should restrict her search to the pillows that had some depiction of cats, since apparently she was turning into the proverbial cat lady before her own eyes. She and Jon hadn't spoken much during his relationship with Val, but after her conversation with Robb, she e-mailed him to let him know he could always ask her if he needed anything. He had replied a week or two later and apologized for taking so long. They'd spoken more frequently after that, although it had taken some time before they'd warmed back up to each other. But warm up they had, and Jon had been the first one Sansa had told when she'd applied and been accepted to the master's degree program in education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The following day, when Sansa's favorite bakery had delivered a fresh lemon cake decorated with the word "CONGRATULATIONS," along with the words _I always believed you would, Sansa. I'm so proud of you! – Jon_ , written in the baker's loopy scrawl on a cute little card, Sansa had burst into laughter, and then into tears. He'd blushed like crazy when she'd FaceTimed him to thank him, and she remembered thinking that was the reddest she'd seen him get in a while, maybe even since they'd so unwillingly played spin-the-bottle back in middle school. But now the cake was gone, and the blue arrivals screen at the airport, where she had agreed to pick up Jon, said that Jon's red-eye flight had landed, and Sansa found herself bouncing on her toes next to a very empty baggage claim station number 13. She nearly tripped over her three-inch heels when she heard Jon calling her name behind her, although he didn't call her name so much as breathe it out in an odd tone she'd never heard him use before. Before she'd even spun all the way around, she felt both of his arms steadying her, and by the time she'd turned the full 180 degrees he was holding her like he'd never let her go. She didn't want him to let her go anyway, and she managed to say something like that when one of his hands traveled upward to stroke her hair as she rested her head on his shoulder. When he finally pulled back, he still had one hand on the back of her head, and the other nestled into her waist, and she grinned a stupid, loopy grin, and so did he. Then he pressed back into her and covered her grin with his lips. They tasted of warmth and salt and sunlight and Jon and joy, and Sansa stopped trying to pull away long enough to tell Jon she loved him.

They had many years of kisses to make up for first.


End file.
